Exploring the worlds of technology and storage

Hey Storage, Are you Getting Soft on Us?

Over the last 18 months, Software Defined Storage (SDS) has evolved from buzzword status to a technology deployed in production environments. How did SDS take this significant leap in such a short time? Industry insiders and analysts alike point to the confluence of three discrete forces:

The relatively rapid move to cloud models for deploying IT services

The continued explosion of data – growing daily to the tune of 2.5 billion GB – and the need to extract business value from this data via analytics

The unleashing of mobile and social workloads

The bottom line is that new IT models, data growth, and workloads have pushed traditional storage paradigms to their limits.

In her recent keynote address at Enterprise 2014 (video below), Jamie Thomas, General Manager, Storage and Software Defined Systems at IBM, outlined the IBM approach to SDS. She emphasized that IBM provides SDS options that optimize the value of data and lead to enhanced business outcomes. She also spoke of IBM SDS offerings delivering value to customers in two fundamental ways: